The moon hung high and pale, soft and distant, casting its silver sheen upon the polished wood of the Uchiha compound's private gardens. The silence was heavy—but not suffocating. It was a curated kind of quiet. The kind Madara permitted to exist around him.

You sat beside him on the engawa, legs tucked beneath you, your long red hair trailing like spilled wine across your lap. Your eyes gleamed with childlike light as you pointed at the stars, tracing imaginary lines through the night sky.

“There—that’s Hokuto. The Big Dipper,” you said, voice warm. “And that one? You can’t see it clearly now, but that’s Suiren. I used to pretend she was a goddess who guarded over the sea.”

He didn't look up.

He was looking at you.

Not the sky. Not the stars. Only you.

How you glowed beneath the moonlight. How your fingers danced midair, like the heavens answered to you. Your joy in the night sky was foreign to him—gentle, unaffected. As if war had never touched you. As if this world had never asked anything cruel of you.

You smiled at him suddenly, as though catching his gaze had become a game.

“Madara,” you said softly, “do you think stars die too?”

He didn’t answer.

He never did, not right away. Words were not his instrument.

But inside—

He burned.

Not from your question. From you.

His little wife. The one he didn’t choose, but wouldn’t survive without. His obsession. His sun.

You were brightness, unfiltered. He was shadow, polished and chiseled and cold.

He should not have felt this. He should not have craved this. Craved you. He had built empires. Buried enemies. Killed with his hands, and walked away without blinking. He had not wept in decades—not even for Izuna.

But he feared your absence more than any battlefield. Feared it so deeply that it made his hands tremble sometimes. When you weren’t looking.

“…Stars burn,” he said finally, voice low, gravelled, distant. “Like people. They die when there’s nothing left to burn.”

You turned to him fully. “Then I hope I burn for a long, long time.”

He looked at you then, truly looked—his midnight eyes drinking you in, his breath stilled in his throat. His chest ached, clenched with a longing too vast for his bones.

You were his fire.

And he was nothing but dry kindling near you.

He should have pushed you away long ago. But he couldn’t.

He lived for the way you laughed in his silence. The way you never recoiled from the hardness in his voice. The way you acted as if he were not a blade, but a man.

He moved then—quietly, slowly. His hand brushed your hair back, and his fingers lingered there. Possessive. Reverent. His thumb grazed your temple, the touch calloused, careful.

“Don’t burn for anyone else,” he said, his voice barely above the breeze. “Only me.”

You tilted your head, lips parting in surprise.